The day before yesterday, I wrote a column filled with gloom and doom, my second such column in two weeks. It reflected the way I think and feel about things; I don't take anything back. On the other hand, I didn't get into this business to be a gloom-and-doom expert.

Little bunny rabbits - that was more my style. Fluffy clouds floating in the sky. Little children playing on the grass. Young lovers locked in their first embrace. Random acts of kindness, charity, affection, respect.

In other words, the part of the human experience that I encounter every day. There may be gloom and doom out there, and we are right to pay attention to these things, but they are not the whole story. We still have each other. We still have Sundays in the park.

Part of the problem is the media. Thanks to the media, we can know more about the world than we ever have before. The literature on, say, Ukraine is gigantic online. History, customs, exports, plus the current latest breaking news, which at the moment is the latest breaking rumors.

We can access it from anywhere; we can access it all day and all night. We have ways of driving ourselves crazy. Doesn't matter which end of the political spectrum you're on - if you want to go mad with worry, the Internet has something for you.

So does the television, for that matter. So do newspapers. Corruption is everywhere in public life. Our nation is dominated by large corporations. Depressingly, all we have to do, always, is follow the money. No matter what administration is in power, the money will always talk.

This constant stream of discouraging news can do bad things to your head. It can make you believe only the worst of people. It can make you fearful, and decisions made by fearful people are often faulty. If you go to sleep thinking about the Keystone XL pipeline, perhaps you are not participating fully enough in your own life.

That's the fear, isn't it? That's what's off-putting about the phenomenon of people staring at their phones while dining. What about the person across from them? That's the business at hand. Even if you are making other social arrangements on your phone, even if you are organizing great things that will change the world, you are losing the chance to see what's going on in the room.

Living through media is like living life at one remove. Reality is buffered by technology.

Living through media means missing the very best part of the human experience. It's hard to see moments of grace in media that value irony. It's hard not to be cynical. Sometimes cynicism is important - particularly when one is dealing with media - but sometimes it can be crippling.

Of course, I am required to follow the news. It is one of the conditions of my employment. I must read these things in order to be au courant. Some days it's an awful hard slog. If I combine the slog with the sneaking suspicion that the world is coming unglued, it can make for some mighty dark thoughts.

But thoughts are abstract. If I lived in Kiev, I would have no choice. The news from Ukraine isn't the news over there - it's just what's going on. It must be exhilarating as well as depressing. Over here, it's just scary.

And yet, my life is fine. I have family; I have friends; I have the sun in the morning and the moon at night. My house is warm and dry. I'm still alive and healthy, and at my age, these are not things that one takes for granted. I experience gratitude almost every day.

I am living the bourgeois dream. Born middle class and raised middle class (in aspiration, if not in income), I have somehow managed to remain in the middle class while so many have slipped. Of course, being continuously employed has something to do with that.

(Lots of people are continuously employed, and it doesn't do much for them - their wages are too low. These are the people left behind while the nation endorsed cutthroat capitalism. I had it relatively easy; I know that. I joined a union early.)

Wait. You see what I did there? I listed the things that are right with my life, and then I immediately took a political view. Yes, it's good for me, but basically things are going to hell. Looking at it politically, I am blind to the better impulses of humanity - impulses that do not often show up in politics.

So today we are counting our blessings. Tomorrow is time enough to count our curses.

Feel the wind on your cheek. Smell the odor of spring flowers. Dance!

"Come, there's half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I am never sure what I cam going to be, from one minute to jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.